


Scenes from a Brownstone, with One Tortoise

by afrocurl, ninemoons42



Category: Elementary (TV), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Banter, Canon Backstory, Cooking, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, First Meetings, Food, Gen, Gun Safety, Guns, Hidden Cameras, Male-Female Friendship, Past Abuse, Piercings, Police, Scars, Snark, Tongue Piercings, Trigger Discipline, Weapons Stash, always-a-girl!Charles - Freeform, consulting detective, sober companion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-25
Updated: 2013-07-25
Packaged: 2017-12-21 08:07:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/897942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrocurl/pseuds/afrocurl, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In another universe, the consulting detective assisting the NYPD is named Erik Lehnsherr, and some time after he gets out of rehab his father hires Charlotte Xavier, formerly a medical doctor, to be Erik's sober companion.</p><p>This isn't quite Elementary, but it's close.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scenes from a Brownstone, with One Tortoise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ang3lsh1](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ang3lsh1/gifts).



“Ms Xavier? You come highly recommended by people who are aware of - ahem - your line of work, and as such, I would like you to look into taking a particular case, the file of which I am forwarding to you as we speak. Your discretion, as well as your prompt reply, would be greatly appreciated.”

Charlotte pulls the phone away from her ear to see the File Received message blinking on the screen. There’s still a little shock threaded into her words, but she pulls an old and familiar air of professionalism back around herself when she replies in her customary crisp and clear inflection: “I’ll inform you of my decision within the next six hours, Mr Maximoff.”

“I look forward to it, Ms Xavier.”

“Just one more question,” she says after she opens the file.

“I am at your service,” her caller says.

“Just what kind of a name is Erik Lehnsherr?”

\---

The man who opens the door of the towering brownstone looks her up and down and declares, in a voice like winter storms, “Did they make you stand on a crate in the operating room?”

He clicks his consonants, just a little, and his voice is sonorous and compelling. It’s a hell of a contrast to his tongue stud and his labret. Those aren’t the only ones, and she nods as she remembers the data in the initial file. In his left ear the man has a helix piercing and a conch piercing, and in his right he has a rook piercing in addition to two lobe piercings.

The man doesn’t wait for her to answer; she raises an eyebrow at his retreating back and says, just as coolly, “Perhaps they made you sit on the floor when you were at rehab.”

A soft, derisive snort. “I have had more than enough of that word to last me a lifetime, thank you very much. Take care not to mention it to me again.” 

She follows the sound of his voice into the interconnected rooms of the first floor, past books stacked in neat piles at the foot of a series of towering bookshelves, past several work tables crammed with everything from a bucket full of keys to architectural blueprints to a head of cabbage - and comes upon a room with seven television monitors plus a book on a monumental lectern.

She looks the man over as he sits down on a three-legged stool that creaks ominously under his weight. Several days’ worth of stubble, sleep creases on his right cheek and both arms, two t-shirts, plaid pajama bottoms with shredded hems. 

Charlotte catches the man glancing at her and puts her left hand in her pocket.

“I don’t intend to hurt you,” the man says as he once again gives her his back, and it’s startling, because the voice is cold but the sincerity weighting it down is deep and terrible and almost knowing. “I am not an advocate of abuse of any kind, and I don’t intend to begin it nor tolerate it. I would prefer it if you were more at ease around me than this. There is no need for a taser.”

“How did you know - ?” she asks. An easier thing to think about. She knows she doesn’t talk about her past in her line of work.

“I collect them,” is the response. “The one that you are carrying has a fairly distinctive shape, not to mention it’s obviously weighing down your jacket, probably because of the batteries. I have at least three of those in the dark crate beneath the window, and from time to time I think about upgrading them for more stopping power, less weight, better ease of use. One of these days, when I am steadier with a soldering iron, I will perhaps get to work. As for the rest, I know when a person has had to take measures to protect him- or herself. I am quite familiar with such scars as you have on your hands and wrists and arms.”

She watches in disbelief as he raises his arms, wrists turning so that she can see the lines crisscrossing below his wrists. Some of those lines are dark, and some are light, and the long one that runs nearly all the way to the inside of his left elbow is faded with age. However long it’s been since that particular visit to an emergency room, it’s still clear that he couldn’t have inflicted that mad zig-zag on himself, though.

“Who did that to you - ” Charlotte breathes out.

“That is of no consequence,” the man says. “Also, I believe you are looking for another kind of marking altogether. I can assure you that you won’t find any track marks on me, recent or otherwise. I’ve been clean, Charlotte Xavier, and I do not need any assistance to stay so.”

Charlotte rallies as best as she can, narrows her eyes at him as she approaches. “Be that as it may, I’m here to help. Being clean is one thing, staying clean is another, and then we have to think about - what is it exactly that you’re doing here? The noise from all of these screens is overwhelming - ”

Erik Lehnsherr - this man has to be Erik Lehnsherr, because he is just exactly as strange as his file has made him out to be - grins as he steeples his fingers beneath his chin. There are quite a lot of lines in his face. “Not at all overwhelming, Ms Xavier. Quite the opposite. The more screens I watch the more I can hone my powers of concentration. Observe,” he says, and then he leaps up and turns to her, pointing to one of the monitors as he declaims part of the opening soliloquy to _Richard III_ :

_Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;_  
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;  
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,  
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.  
Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;  
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds  
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,  
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber  
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. 

Charlotte shrugs and tries not to look impressed. Not many people, in her experience, would pick _that_ play when asked for favorites. “You could be cheating,” she says instead, “people learn that at school, maybe perform it on stage, and your file says you have one hell of an eidetic talent.”

Lehnsherr laughs, looking genuinely amused as he lunges for the iPhone on a nearby rolling desk. “So you pay attention, Ms Xavier, the medical profession has quite lost a sterling practitioner.”

She’s trained herself to stop flinching when people bring up the past, and she does her best to do so now. “And with you it seems that I have to pay even more attention.”

“You could always think of this as a holiday,” Lehnsherr says. “I don’t need you, and there are other things you could be doing with your time and the money you’ll be receiving from my father. You could leave me to my own devices. In turn, I will leave you to yours.”

“When you speak of your own devices,” Charlotte says, “what are you talking about exactly?”

The phone rings, then, and he hits ANSWER and then SPEAKER in rapid succession. “Captain MacTaggert, what can I do for you today?”

A woman’s voice, harried and throaty from too little sleep or too much coffee or both, answers. “I think I’ve got something here that you need to look at, Lehnsherr. You’d better hustle; I can only hold off the CSIs for so long.”

“On my way, Captain,” he says, and then before Charlotte can blink he’s striding right towards her, hands out. “Please, may I help you with your coat?”

“I - what?” 

“Your coat, please,” he says, with the same insistent courtliness tempered by impatience that he’s shown her so far. “You asked me what I do. Perhaps it’s best that I show you, instead of wasting my breath explaining.”

After he pulls a heavy corduroy sports jacket on over his t-shirts he opens the door for her; a taxi whirls up to them at his sharp whistle. He glances at his mobile phone and rattles off an address for the driver, then looks up and shrugs in Charlotte’s direction. “You are about to ask me what the NYPD could possibly want with such as myself. Easy enough to answer; I am a consulting detective.”

“Never heard that one before,” Charlotte says, trying to watch him and her surroundings all at once.

“I invented the name; it’s a poor moniker for the breadth of my expertise, but it seems acceptable to the police here, as it did to the ones at Scotland Yard.”

Charlotte’s head is spinning with sudden panic; that’s the only reason why the next thing out of her mouth is, “I’m pretty certain none of the details of my family’s case ever came out - ”

“Ms Xavier,” Lehnsherr says.

She stops dead, winces, and puts her fingers to her temple. “There’s a reason I paid so much to have that thing done in the first place. Just wasted it, haven’t I?”

“Ms Xavier,” he says, once again. “I did not need to read any case files to figure out what happened to you in the past. I only had to observe you for a moment to know.”

She shoots him a dubious look.

“Before I opened the door you were looking over your shoulder, and you did it again before crossing the threshold. You are too practiced at checking if there are people following you. And then there’s the part where you would only present your right side to me, while we were speaking back at the brownstone.” He has a quiet urgency in his voice. “Defensive tactics employed when one’s assailant is much bigger or much stronger or both. Believe me, I understand. Believe me, I’ve seen it before. You’ve survived something, Ms Xavier, and that’s saying a lot about you.

“And in turn I ask you to believe me when I say, you shouldn’t be here. Take this cab and go on your way, separate from mine. My work takes me to all kinds of places that no one should have to go to.”

“From praise to an insult in two breaths,” Charlotte murmurs, “I’m almost impressed. And it’s not going to work. That’s not the first time for me either. I’m staying, and I’m going to work with you, Mr Lehnsherr, so you had simply better get used to me being around.”

There’s a long pause, icy and heavy, during which the cabbie pulls up to a rundown building with a weather-worn sign for a hotel on the front.

“On your own head be it,” Lehnsherr mutters, at last, and he opens the door and offers her his arm.

\---

There’s a soft roar of falling rain and cascades against her window when she wakes up several weeks later, and Charlotte groans in defeat before scrabbling in her closet for a third t-shirt to wear under her running jacket.

“I hate storms,” she mutters to herself as she clatters down the stairs. 

The bareness of the brownstone is, in its own way, comforting; there are no needlessly ornate things to trip over or be careful of, and going down the stairs is just a mundane thing, step after easy step.

She’s been in houses where every gewgaw was a weapon and every room was a trap, where staircases just made looking for hiding places so much more difficult.

When she passes through the kitchen to retrieve her water bottles, Erik is hunched over at the kitchen table, eyes closed. In his right hand there is a thick sheaf of papers, and in his left there is a leaf of cabbage for the tortoise who is quietly munching at the ends, seemingly content with his lot in life. There’s a bowl of cereal next to Erik’s elbow, empty except for the soaked crumbs at the bottom.

“Morning, Clyde,” Charlotte says quietly as she refills the tortoise’s water dish. “Morning, Erik,” she adds when the man’s eyes snap open.

“Good morning, Ms Xavier,” he says around a truly huge yawn. “Please pick up some milk on your way back.”

“You’re not coming with?”

“Since I was up all last night trying to figure out the specifics of Detective Bell’s current dilemma, I believe I’ll pass.”

Charlotte sighs, and pulls on her fingerless gloves and a shapeless beanie. “Physical activity might just stimulate your memories another way, you know.”

“Be that as it may. Thank you for the generous offer, but no thank you. I shall bring you extra blankets for when you come back in, instead, if you’d like.”

“Make it extra towels and you’ve got yourself a deal,” Charlotte says, and then she’s checking her pockets for her keys and her music player and her phone, and she’s out the door. The rain freezes on her face almost instantly, and not even the rhythm of the run can completely stop her from shivering in every gust.

Still, she has a reason to grin to herself; Erik Lehnsherr might pride himself on being mostly above the ordinary things, but he still looks gobsmacked at her bright pink jacket and dark gray thermal running gear. Or perhaps it might have something to do with the fact that she wears running shoes in a hideous clash of neon orange and yellow? Either way he wears the exact same expression every morning she goes out for a run, and it hasn’t quite gotten old yet.

She wonders how long he’ll sit staring at the door this time, before Clyde or - more likely, the cereal - occupies his attention once again. He goes through an entire box every few days; she’s never met anyone who likes crunchy nut cornflakes the way he does.

She’s not opposed to bacon and beans and toast, but she _also_ likes a nice bowl of oatmeal from time to time, particularly when dosed with milk and a few chopped nuts. And then there had been that strange case in Koreatown, where she’d accepted a plastic tub of freshly-made kimchi from one of the restaurants across the street from the scene of the crime. 

Maybe she’ll chop up some of the kimchi and put it in her scrambled eggs when she gets back with the milk.

\---

There are still a few layers left in the container of kimchi in the refrigerator. Charlotte notices it just after a long run, and right after she checks if it can still keep a little longer she spots a white package from one of the delis that MacTaggert had pointed out to her downtown, neatly wrapped and innocuous on the shelf just above. 

She hesitates, just, before she takes it out and unwraps it - and then Charlotte scoffs as uncovers the lox. A lot of it, more than enough for the two of them, enough for the week and then some.

They actually haven’t been anywhere near a deli in the last three weeks, no cases related to food, and so the lox just seems odd. As she looks at the pink flesh, she remembers telling Erik about being on the lookout for proper lox, but never being able to find something that’s just to her tastes. 

He must have bought it for her. If Erik hadn’t been sleeping soundly, sprawled out on the desk beneath which they keep Clyde’s box - how does he sleep on the floor, she wonders as she glances back at him - she’d ask him where he got it.

After a while she gives up on the questions and looks at the lox, and decides that if Erik has been silly enough to buy so much for her, she’ll put it to good use, and she clatters around the kitchen, looking for the wherewithal for breakfast.

As usual, the rest of the fridge is a hodgepodge of the most bizarre collection of food she’s ever seen, and that’s counting her days as an intern. Kimchi next to, thankfully, a still sealed container of creme fraiche, and hummus next to that, nearly identical in its plastic tub next to the applesauce. There’s goat cheese, too, and some kind of strange fruit and nut candy that makes Charlotte wrinkle her nose, mixed in among the myriad other items Erik’s purchased on whims during the day.

If there were more hours in the day, she might reorganize the food and put all the shelves back in order, just to marvel at Erik’s thoroughly interesting scowl. Equal parts irritation and “why didn’t I think of that” and pure curiosity.

She digs up a large bag of spinach, miraculously still usable, from the depths of the vegetable bin, and she finally settles on what she’s going to make.

The sizzle of butter hitting the frying pan crackles throughout the kitchen and she hopes that the noise doesn’t wake Erik. In her time here at the brownstone, she’s learned a few things about his sleeping habits. She knows that he snatches at sleep, and gets so little of it - and she also knows that what he gets tends to be enough for him to function when he’s on a case, except when it’s not, which is usually the point at which she takes his files away and turns out the lights over his protests.

Sweet smells arise from the spinach as it cooks down, from the lox as it heats through. She smiles to herself because she knows just how sacrilegious it is to cook smoked salmon, but it’s scrambled eggs, she has a good excuse - and just as she fetches the plates, Erik’s footfalls echo through the apartment.

She turns away from the stove to take him in: his tattered pajama pants and his t-shirt - the one that says _Kiss me I’m Irish_ , today, both creased beyond redemption. His hair sticking out in all directions. The always-strange contrast of gleaming metal and his stubble and skin.

“What are you doing?” he asks just after he rubs out the sleep from his eyes. He follows the question up with a truly epic yawn, and then a series of quiet sneezes. “Excuse me,” he mutters, mostly to himself.

“You bought lox. I thought I’d make an omelette with it. Want?” She knows that the question is unnecessary and ill-advised, but she adores the small moments when she can rib Erik for all his idiosyncrasies. 

Erik nods and plunks himself down at the kitchen table without another word, and Charlotte deals out the food and the bread and, because she’s feeling extra nice, she also puts his cereal within easy reach.

\---

Hard cases make for exhausted days and nights spent crawling home from taxicab to bed, and the next morning the only thing Charlotte can think about is a hot bath and going back to sleep.

But she can never predict what Erik’s mind might look for in terms of a similar sort of healthy release after such stress.

She never asks what he does with his time after a case is closed, but this is a day where she has to know and she’s not really looking forward to the experience. Even so, she steels herself. She needs to know that he’s not relapsing or thinking about relapsing, and she needs to know that he’s not breaking the conditions of his employment.

Bath first, though, and she drops several bath bombs into the tub and settles in, sighing as the steaming water leaches the pain away, relaxes her strung-out nerves.

She sleeps, briefly, and she dreams of nothing - a welcome relief after such a gruesome murder.

The sun comes up as she’s toweling herself dry, as she wrestles her hair back into some semblance of order, and she heads downstairs, preparing to meet Erik’s boundless energy and relentless drive forward.

Erik is already halfway through a bowl of cereal and when she draws level with him, she thinks of deja vu, because she can see his eyes moving from monitor to monitor as all of the televisions flutter and flash their images, and she sighs as quietly as she can. He’s already hunting for another case.

“Can’t this - we - wait a day?” she asks, though she knows what the answer will be.

Erik tilts his head to the side, still looking at all the televisions before he starts hitting buttons on remote controls and one by one the blaring programs go dark and silent. He stands up and puts the cereal bowl to one side. “Very well then. If you are proposing that we take the day off, then I have something to show you.” There’s no malice in his voice, only the singular resolve that she knows means he has a plan for the day if he’s not going to dive head-first into something else.

“Then show me.” As she watches him gracefully stand up and move towards a small alcove in the living room, she starts to wonder what he has in mind.

He coughs before he says anything, though, as if he’s trying to distract her. “I have installed cameras throughout the rooms of this house. I think it’s time you know where they are.”

She wants to rail about the invasion of her privacy, but she catches herself in time and thinks about what he’s said - and then it all starts to make sense.

Erik’s obsessive, passionate and suspicious. Of course he would put up cameras to find out what was going on here when they weren’t around. 

She has a question on the tip of her tongue, but she suppresses the need to ask it as he walks her back through the house.

Each camera is well-hidden and nearly impossible to see, which she hopes is the point. Again, she doesn’t ask because Erik’s moving with an energy that suggests to her that he’s still amped from the case. She lets it pass, as she does with so many other things because the battles that need to be fought are more demanding than the case of where the cameras are.

There are even hidden cameras in the beehives on the roof, and Charlotte has to admire Erik’s thoroughness - and then she thinks she has to revise that judgement when he leads her back into the living room and jumps up and down on the end of one of the floorboards, located exactly halfway between the armchair Charlotte uses when she’s studying and one of the bookshelves.

“What are you doing?” she asks, and her mind starts running through the possibilities of what exactly could be hidden underneath the floor.

“Showing you where the knives and swords are. Just in case.”

She sighs heavily, steps back, folds her arms, as Erik starts talking about the three blades he pulls from the case laid into the floor: she hears him say “exquisite craftsmanship” and “doesn’t take much to cut through muscle and bone” and other alarming things, such as “eventually you’ll want to learn how to use one of these.”

There’s no use in arguing about the reason for the blades all being in the floor. 

Maybe their location will prove useful at some later date. Who’s to say in this place.

\---

On bright mornings, Charlotte wishes she had better blinds, or perhaps a mask to wear, to keep the blinding yellow sunlight that seems to fall into her room from the boundless buildings surrounding the brownstone.

Erik, as per usual, had kept her up long past when she wanted to sleep the night before, and as if that conversation hadn’t been enough, now Erik’s in her room clanking away at her closet.

“What are you doing?” she asks through the pillow.

“Picking out your outfit for the day. There’s been a call. We must leave immediately.”

She groans, not pretending to be anything but offended at the NYPD’s choice to call Erik and not her this time. She starts thinking about the earful she intends to deliver to _both_ MacTaggert and Bell this time.

And there’s no reason for her to have to try and get out of bed when in addition to the blankets, Erik has thrown at least five of her outfits on top. It feels like that many, at least.

“Why are you picking out anything for me?” She turns to look at his smug smile and realizes that he must think this a sign of trust. He knows her well enough to pick out her outfits. Too bad he doesn’t quite know her well enough to know that she hates having her clothes thrown at her when she’s not out of bed.

“We have to get going now, Charlotte. You don’t have time to agonize over an outfit.”

Now she wishes that there were a knife or two in her room that she could throw at him. “If that’s true, why are they still on my bed when I can’t get out? Move them and maybe we’ll get to the crime scene in an hour.” She throws him a look to demonstrate how serious she is. “Maybe.”

She feels the clothes being pulled back off her body, and tries not to smile too broadly at how well things can go when Erik follows her suggestions.

\---

Naps weren’t really something that Charlotte did before she began to work for one Jakob Lehnsherr. She remembers that there were brief respites during off hours in rotations, but those weren’t so much naps as they were necessities and a function of her job.

Now, though, she naps. She finds that the odd hours of Erik’s work make it impossible to sleep as most people do, and so she steals a few hours when she can in the still of the house.

She hates that she thinks about her habits just as she wakes from another nap. The house is eerily quiet - odd enough - and on her nightstand is Clyde, looking bored and thirsty. 

Clyde turns slowly in place. Hanging from his mouth is the corner of a piece of paper, which seems to continue under him, and just as he’s about to take a larger bite, Charlotte looks at the paper and sees Erik’s handwriting.

Carefully she extracts the rest of the note from Clyde’s jaws, and reads:

_Went out for a bit, but thought you could use the sleep. Will bring home dinner. Chinese?_

_EL_

Surprisingly, it’s the nicest thing Erik has done for her in the several months that they’ve shared the brownstone.

\---

Erik is snoring quietly on the couch when Charlotte finally makes it down the stairs, and she shrugs and tucks the blanket more snugly around his shoulders before hobbling into the kitchen.

It’s a nice surprise to open the refrigerator door and see both the new bottle of milk and the fresh carton of eggs in the chiller - but the real reason for her sudden smile is the ice pack wrapped in a kitchen towel, which she immediately takes out and ties snugly around her left ankle.

“I’m going to have to buy new shoes, aren’t I,” she murmurs as she picks Clyde up from his box and puts him down on the breakfast table.

She’s partway through the morning newspapers and her first coffee of the day when her mobile phone buzzes.

_Was driving to the station but remembered there’s something I need to talk to you about. Can I come in? Capt MM_

Charlotte blinks, looks at an oblivious Clyde, and hobbles through the apartment. There is a familiar shadow at the door. She clicks all the locks open and puts a finger to her lips. “We’ll have to talk quietly. Erik’s sleeping.”

“We’ve been working him pretty hard in the last few days,” Captain MacTaggert murmurs. “Maybe we should get him a fruit basket or something.”

“Save your money, Captain,” and Charlotte smiles. “You told me yourself, after all, that he positively thrives on this kind of thing.”

“Well, yes, he does at that.” MacTaggert stops dead when she sees the breakfast table. “...Turtle?”

“Tortoise,” Charlotte says. “That’s Clyde.”

“Hello, Clyde,” MacTaggert says quietly, and then she takes the seat farthest from him. “How’s your foot?”

“A little better, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be running on it for another week or so. Just have to keep icing it.”

“You do that. In the meantime, I need you to sit down and pay attention - and follow instructions.” The Captain looks grim for a moment, and the scar running across her throat seems to darken even in the bright light of the kitchen. “I’m going to have to insist you learn how to use a gun, Charlotte - ”

“I’m not going to start carrying one of those things around, thank you,” Charlotte says, quiet and forceful. “That’s what I have a taser for.”

“I’m not asking you to start carrying one of these around; I’m asking you to learn how to use them. Two different things.”

“...Why?”

MacTaggert frowns like storm clouds gathering overhead. “You’ve mentioned that you’re studying to be an investigator. Well, you need to study this, too,” she says as she puts her service pistol on the table. It is still in its holster, and the business end of it is pointed away from everyone at the table, including Clyde. 

“Because guns are a source of information,” Charlotte says, slowly. Reluctantly.

She remembers the smell of gun oil, and she remembers looking down at a drawer splattered with blood, the red staining matte black and blued steel. 

“I understand this is a touchy subject for you,” the Captain says, kind but firm, “but I have to insist. Please, Charlotte.”

“...This is the thing you wanted to talk to me about?”

“If it makes you feel any better, this isn’t just my idea. Bell’s worried about you, and so’s about half my team. Can’t say I blame any of them.”

Charlotte looks away. Scratches Clyde’s shell with a fingertip. She’s lost in thought. The smell of cordite is suddenly strong in her nostrils. She’d get up and run if she could, but she won’t get far, not with her ankle in the condition it is now.

On the other hand, they’ve already had to stare down the barrel of at least one loaded gun. She remembers Erik planting himself in harm’s way, determination in every line of him.

“...Okay, Captain.” Charlotte grits her teeth and reaches out carefully for the gun, though her hand stops well short of it. “That’s loaded, right? Show me how to unload it.”

“You’re a natural at this,” MacTaggert says, sounding approving. “Gun safety; I assume you’ve heard of it.”

“I know two things,” Charlotte says. “ _All guns are loaded_. And something called _trigger discipline_.”

MacTaggert nods. “Okay. That’s a good place to start. So, as you said: unloading the gun.” Her hands move as she speaks. She is calm and unhurried and careful. Even as she takes the pistol out of the holster, it’s always pointed away. “This is my sidearm; it’s a SIG Sauer P226. There’s a full manual that goes with this and I’ll email it to you later; you need to read the whole thing and understand it thoroughly. But just the basics for now, all right?”

Charlotte nods. There is something terribly compelling about the stark black of the firearm against the weathered wood of the table.

“Okay, I’m decocking it now.” The Captain does something to a switch on the gun, just above the grip, and then she hits another switch and the magazine comes out, and she puts it a few inches away. “That’s the magazine. There’s still a round chambered in the gun, though. I’m going to take it out now, like so.”

Then Charlotte is looking at the gun, locked and open; next to it is a 9mm hollowpoint round, and next to that free round is a magazine full of the same. She knows just how much damage those bullets can do, and the memory of the last time she’d seen one of those - though it was in a very different state from the one she’s looking at now - makes her take a deep breath before she can nod. “Okay. So now the gun is unloaded.”

“But you should still treat it as though it were, because you did not unload it yourself,” MacTaggert says. “When you pick it up, point it away from yourself and from me.”

“And from Clyde.”

“And from Clyde. Look down the slide to make sure that there’s nothing in it, and check to make sure that there’s no magazine.”

Charlotte does so, keeping the muzzle pointed at the table, but not at her feet. She takes care to avoid touching the trigger, too. “There are no rounds in the barrel, and it’s not blocked. There is no magazine in the gun.”

The Captain nods. “Good. Lesson number one, then. We’ll proceed from there. Do I want to know how you know your trigger discipline?”

Charlotte bites her lip, and puts the pistol down. “I - don’t think so.”

MacTaggert frowns, but only for a moment. “All right. Forget I asked, and let’s keep going. _All guns are loaded, even when they’re not_ , and now you know how to check my gun to see if it’s loaded or not. It’s different from gun to gun. Bell carries a Glock so you’ll have to take a lesson from him in loading and unloading it, as well.”

“Okay.”

“Next rule,” the Captain says, “which you are doing a pretty good job with right now. _Only point a gun at something you intend to kill or destroy._ I saw you avoiding your feet earlier. Remember that you should also avoid mine.”

Charlotte glances at the floor and nods.

“ _Finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot_ , you’re good with that as well. And finally: _Know where your target is, and know what’s near that target and behind that target._ A bullet has to go somewhere after it leaves the gun. You have to know, at all times, where that somewhere is.”

“And these rules are part of you already,” Charlotte says.

MacTaggert nods as she reassembles her gun. “I wouldn’t be any kind of cop if this wasn’t already hardwired into my hands, into my nerves. I barely have to think about it. And if you think I’m good at this, talk to Bell. He’s been around guns for a long time; he’s more careful with them than anyone else I have ever known.”

Charlotte sighs and takes a sip of her coffee, now stone-cold. “I guess that makes sense.”

There’s a step behind them, and warmth at Charlotte’s back, and she doesn’t flinch when Erik speaks, nearly right over her head. “It was a good lesson, Captain,” he says quietly. “I was listening in.”

“You’re going to tell me,” Charlotte murmurs, “that I’m going to need more instruction.”

“As do I,” is the startling reply. “I don’t keep guns here, and so I am woefully out of practice. As soon as you can stand on your ankle for an hour or so, we will go to a firing range and speak to a range safety officer. Could you recommend a few places for us, Captain?”

MacTaggert raises an eyebrow, and nods. 

\---

The doorbell rings at nine-thirty on the dot, and Charlotte scoops Clyde up and puts him in his box on her desk before she wipes her hands on her denim skirt and goes to open the front door.

“Good morning, Charlotte,” the woman on the step says. “I passed by a farmer’s market on the way here, and I saw some rather excellent mushrooms. I hear they make a fairly good substitute for hamburgers, if you’re trying to avoid meat.”

Charlotte grins and lets her in. “That’s something Erik might do from time to time, not me. But that doesn’t mean that I would say no to a decent mushroom sauce. Pasta or rice this time?”

“Oh, brown rice, certainly,” Mrs Hudson says with a smile. 

Charlotte follows her to the kitchen, where the first thing she does is take off her very stylish and very spiky boots. How she manages to walk around on the slushed streets without falling, Charlotte has no idea, and she’s frankly more than a little green with envy. “Coffee?” Mrs Hudson asks.

“Always.” Charlotte goes to rinse out her mug.

“Pass me some knives, please, while you’re there.”

Mrs Hudson sets her shopping bag down on the kitchen counter and starts pulling out all kinds of things. Food items in a pile on the left; non-food on the right. “Soap, dishwashing liquid, scrubbing pads, and a little more air freshener for the upstairs rooms. You must be sick and tired of the smell of turpentine by now.”

Charlotte shrugs and thinks about a recent case, for which Erik had spent three nights painting an anonymous skyline under midnight stars; she’s still picking up tubes of cobalt blue and cerulean blue from all over the house even now. “I could always open a window if I felt dizzy, or I could go out and take a walk.”

“True,” Mrs Hudson says as she works with the coffee machine. “I can sympathize. Modeling for me was always a more controlled thing, you know. Twenty minutes posing, fifteen minutes resting; sometimes a little longer when the artist needed to concentrate on details, but I never sat for longer than an hour. No escape from the smells while I was needed.”

Charlotte wrinkles her nose. 

“My sentiments exactly. Have you ever been painted, Charlotte?”

“Not really.” Charlotte sighs and toys with the package of mushrooms, large dark discs that give off a rich earthy smell, redolent of rain. “I grew up in a house where the walls were crowded with ancestors’ portraits. Not a smile in them as far as I could remember. The last ones were painted just before the World Wars. Maybe someone got tired of the tradition.”

“You’ll excuse me for taking a professional interest,” Mrs Hudson says, but she is gentle and kind when she pours a fresh mug of coffee for Charlotte. “Art’s an important thing for me.”

“I like looking at good paintings as much as the next person does, I’m just not sure I’d be a good subject myself.”

“You’d be fairly compelling, my dear. There are lots of contrasts in your face. As opposed to yours truly,” Mrs Hudson says, wry and sweetly self-deprecating. “I seem to be a shape of similar colors: blonde hair, tanned skin, brown eyes, and that is just how I like to be. However, I can admit that in terms of being painted there’s not much in the way of interest here,” and she points at her own nose. 

“You, on the other hand, you’re all kinds of colors. Red in your cheeks, dark shades in your hair and a little red, blue eyes, freckles in your pale skin. Have you ever been a model, or perhaps has Erik asked you to sit for him?”

Charlotte shakes her head.

“More’s the pity,” Mrs Hudson says. 

One of the clocks chimes, ten quick notes, and Mrs Hudson nods and starts from the kitchen. “I’ll start upstairs if you need me,” she says.

“Mind the drop sheets,” Charlotte says helpfully.

“I will.”

**Author's Note:**

> While the writers of this fic have done their best to make the information on gun safety in one of the parts of this fic clear, concise, and comprehensive, there is no substitute for actual training with firearms. Such training can be had from many sources more qualified than these present writers. That part of the fic is not intended to be used as a substitute for said training. [Paraphrased from TVTropes - Notes on Gun Safety]


End file.
